The Invention of Wings: A Novel

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Sarah’s youngest sister and godchild (and also a real historical figure). Nina is more headstrong and outspoken than Sarah but shares Sarah’s passion to speak out against slavery. After causing numerous scandals in Charleston…

See Penguin’s Book Club Kit for additional material, including selected “Words of Wisdom” from the novel, recipes, and more. The Invention of Wings, The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story The Invention of Wings has been a favorite for years, is on my lifetime favorites list, and is always at the top of my recommendation list. If you missed reading this or are looking for an excellent book club selection, I highly recommend this amazing story! Pictured below are my dearest reading buddies from book club day. Memorable Characters. Invention of Wings is told through dual, alternating perspectives as we follow the lives of Sarah and Hetty and learn of their fears, hopes, and dreams. From an early age, Sarah exhibits a strong sense of social justice and equality (evidenced when Sarah teaches Hetty to read), and later we see her straining against her family’s and society’s expectations for a southern woman as she makes decisions to speak for abolition and fight for women’s rights. Through Hetty aka “Handful,” we experience the cruel treatment of slaves and also learn about her cultural heritage on her mother’s side. Each character faces limitations put on them and learns she is stronger than she thinks. How would you describe Sarah and Angelina’s unusual bond? Do you think either one of them could have accomplished what they did on their own? Have you known women who experienced this sort of relationship as sisters?Barely a stone’s throw from the slave quarters where Handful and her mother share a room behind the grand Grimké house, another young woman fights a different battle with the constraints of her society. Sarah Grimké is the middle daughter of a wealthy and prominent family at the pinnacle of Charleston’s social hierarchy—the daughter her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. From the time of her first violent childhood confrontation with slavery, Sarah is unable to abide the oppression and brutality of the slave system that surrounds her. Ambitious and keenly intelligent, she harbors an intense longing to have a voice in the world and to follow her father and brothers’ footsteps to a profession in the law. Crushed by the strictures that her family and society impose on women, Sarah forges a tortuous, yet brave path toward abolition and women’s rights—a crusade in which she will be joined by her fiery sister Angelina. This is a book whose topic is one which makes me feel supremely uncomfortable; slavery. Usually, I avoid books like this, they make me feel wretched and sad; tethered as I am here in 2014 and utterly powerless to change history. Before this novel, I knew nothing of Sarah Grimke and her sister Nina and I'm grateful to Sue Monk Kidd for enlightening me.

Kidd has done a marvelous job of capturing two special and vibrant voices. . . I can’t recall reading a book about slavery that presented in such vivid and heartbreaking detail just what the daily life and labor felt like.”– The Minneapolis Star Tribune How does the spirit tree function in Handful’s life? What do you think of the rituals and meanings surrounding it?I didn't know before reading that The Invention of Wings was based on the true story of Sarah Grimke and her sister. Beginning from Grimke's early childhood, Wings shows how she struggled to come to terms with a system that she couldn't accept and to somehow find her own place in the world, going against all convention and expectations for women in the deep south. Handful's story was a glimpse of what life was like for a slave, her hopes, dreams, and many hardships. Her story was poignant yet full of life and perseverance. Sarah was steeped in family and cultural expectations for women, which crashed over and over against her ravenous intellect and hunger for an education, her passion for a vocation, her indomitable moral compass, and her courage—qualities that came to be reflected in her silver fleur de lis button, an object she would lose and re-find, figuratively, many times. The development of Sarah’s freedom necessitated a whole series of “copper tub moments,” each one bringing her a little closer to breaking fully free. My favorite such moment may be when she’s caring for her dying father at the Jersey shore, and she wades into the ocean. Turning loose of the sea-rope, to which all the women grasp, she strides off on her own into the waves. Floating alone in the water, far from the tether, became her own baptism into her apartness and independence. It was a small beginning. Later, she would have another moment when the inner voice showed up, telling her to go north. They go on and on, but the final piece of her liberation doesn’t come, perhaps, until the end, when she’s able to speak her mind in the house where she was born.

You had never heard of the Grimké sisters before you received the inspiration for The Invention of Wings. How did you first hear about them, and what was it about their story that captivated you? Sarah Grimké is the middle daughter. The one her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, Hetty 'Handful' Grimké is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift. Sarah knows what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept. And so, indeed, the trouble begins ...

Where to start in trying to explain all the amazing things this novel contained. It is powerful, intense, profound and amazing in every way. The real life How did you go about writing the complicated relationship between Handful and Sarah? It’s hard to come up with a relationship between characters more challenging to write about than that of an owner and a slave. Even if the owner is an unwilling one, even if she has an abolitionist’s heart beating in her chest, as Sarah does, it’s still a problematic situation. It was the thing that kept me up at nights—Handful and Sarah’s fraught connection and whether I was getting it right. In the novel, their relationship spans three and half decades, much of which they spend as constant companions. To a large extent, they mold one another’s lives and shape each other’s destinies. There’s an undeniable caring between them, but also the built-in gulf of slavery. Handful tries to capture it when she says, “People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt. I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing.”